Proponents of school choice frequently claim that competition with charters (and vouchers) will cause public schools to improve as they fight for “customers.” That is the way it works in the business world, so it should work in education, so they say.
Here is a comment by a Florida teacher who explains what happens in the real world:
As a public school teacher, I am enraged at our situation in Florida. Just this year we lost more than 300 students to a local charter chain (the nearby Academica). Because of this they relocated 16 teachers, closed the third floor, and the library is closed for the students with no librarian. I called around to neighboring schools and the situation is just as bad at other schools. Now I am stuck in a room of 40 or so students in which 20% barely speak english and I have major behavioral problems that charters don’t have to deal with. How much longer can we stand for this? Has the democratic party abandoned its union interests? It is time for real “Systemic Reform” that works.
Read more about the for-profit Academica charter chain here, in a post by Jersey Jazzman.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Peter Greene has a post that speaks to the idea of competition “improving” education. One problem (among many) is that education is not a voluntary market – students are mandated to go to school until at least age 16. He compares that to a government mandate to buy a coffeemaker. Since a lot of people don’t want a coffeemaker because they don’t like coffee, such a mandate would create competition among coffee makers for things that have nothing to do with excellent coffee – some coffee makers would be designed and marketed for how good they look sitting on your counter, others might be designed and marketed for how cheap they are since you didn’t want one anyway. Anyway, he says it better than I did: http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2015/01/involuntary-free-market.html
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The campaign continues.
SCHOOL CHOICE WEEK KICKS OFF: Get used to seeing yellow: Supporters of school choice will be out in force all week, and many will be wearing the movement’s signature yellow scarves. Marches and rallies are planned in Colorado, Ohio and Alabama, among other states. Hundreds of charter schools will hold open houses, home-schooling parents will host information sessions – and an online school in Oregon will throw a beach party where students and teachers can meet face-to-face. All told, a record 11,000 events are planned. Look up festivities by zip code: http://bit.ly/1BREXV5.
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I saw they have some high-profile DC politicians taking time out of their busy schedules to appear. When’s the last time you saw someone out of DC promoting public schools?
They’ll knock each other out of the way to get to the microphones to bash public schools and pontificate on “accountability!” but they can’t even act as effective advocates for the public schools in the states or districts they (supposedly) represent.
We should hire some advocates for public school kids. The people we’re paying aren’t much interested in doing the job.
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I think it’s a genuine conceptual problem for ed reformers. They refuse to see context.
Public schools are universal systems. If you pull on one string in the system ALL the schools change and there was never any guarantee that it would be win/win. I think it was nuts to assume it would be win/win. It’s incredibly reckless.
IF the “schools of choice” end up with fewer higher needs students, THEN the public school ends up with more higher needs students and fewer resources.
IF kids move in and out of cybercharters willy-nilly (as in Ohio) THEN the local public school has to deal with the cyber-charter churn AND that affects every single kid in the receiving public schools negatively. That’s actually a lose/lose. Both sets of kids lose.
There are downsides to introducing risk like this. That’s just true. It could be win/win, but it could also be win/lose (as here) or lose/lose. There’s not even a guarantee of a net gain. Never was.
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We have models of what the end game looks like – Chile did what we’re doing for decades.
We know this system will not end up with every child having good schools or good teachers and that the magic of the market will not magically filter out all the bad actors or solve problems of inequity and poverty.
What it will do is funnel money, create churn, create chaos in schools, and generally take funds out of local economies, but the “choice” schools won’t suddenly become accountable because parents will still be bound by geography as a matter of physics and parents will have to choose their local charter thus being indicative of “demand” whether they wanted a charter or not.
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I think Dianne has hit one part of the nail on the head, as do you, Chiara. The 300 or so who have left are typically students who are performing well, while the ones remaining are the ones who may not be performing as well, who may have special needs, whose parents may not be interested, who may come from a background of disinterest or neglect, who may be unable to speak the language, or a myriad of other learning-threatening situations. While I am all for choice, many of the students left behind either have no choice or have no interest. The charter school, meanwhile, has very interested patrons. Also, in Diane’s school, she is handed a class with no choice but to accept – literacy or lack of it, challenges, both physical and psychological – all are on her roster. Meanwhile, the charter schools turn away those who can’t or who don’t meet their requirements.
I propose, then, the British Columbia model. Give the vouchers, but only at half-rate. If it costs $6000 to go to a Florida public school (and I’m just picking a number – I have no idea what the reality is or what the variance is from county to county), instead of the entire $6000 leaving the District, send over $3000 to the charter school and let the other $3000 be used to bolster public ed. Then, as in BC, you will actually need a few students to hop over the fence every year to supplement the sagging system. Another benefit would be that both the public and the charter schools would have to shore up their offerings and presentation to retain and to market what they have to each new crop of children (and parents). I still think it’s a win-win.
…
Someone else posted it – good teachers (with means) in either system make all the difference in the world.
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Anthony, the problem with your proposal is that supporters of charters and vouchers give big dollars to legislators and in short order, there would be an adjustment of the funding to give full funding to charters and vouchers, then funding for capital projects.
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It was time for “real ‘Systemic Reform’ that works” decades ago. We could have the best public school system in the world if its structure were based upon the necessary chronological progression of language development, reading levels and self discipline. A school system comprised of Language School, Literacy School and Academic School would enable all children to reach the full potential they had at birth.
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I am recommending the following report for all. It may not be the most appropriate topic here but still worth reading. 21% of the students in LAUSD attend charter schools this year.
ARRA LAUSD Charter School Special Education Needs Assessment Report of Findings
Click to access CJ%20NEEDS%20ASSESSMENT%20FULL%20REPORT.pdf
“This is a report of the findings of a needs assessment of Special Education services in LAUSD charter schools conducted by Cross & Joftus, at the request of the district and funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA). This study focuses exclusively on how the schools appear to be taking advantage of the flexibility they have as charters to address the needs of all students, particularly those with disabilities. The study also looks at how they bring leadership, commitment and innovation to the demanding challenges of special education. It examines the varied ways they seek and use resources available through the regionʼs Special Education Local Plan Area (SELPA) infrastructure. Finally, it offers perspectives on how they perceive the advantages of the new LAUSD SELPA focused on charter schools.”
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Yes, Raj. Among their clients are the usual suspects:
Bill and Melinda
Broad
Joyce Foundation
Wallace Foundation
Walton
What else do you want to share?
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They won the “The Broad Prize for Public Charter Schools Review Board.” Do you think they are impartial?
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To me the worst aspect of the charter school snake oil is this:
The same “reformers” (like my governor, Andrew Cuomo, who is out to eviscerate public schools and replace them with charters) who promote charter schools as centers of innovation are working as hard as they can to SUPPRESS innovation in public schools through relentless high-stakes testing. The hypocrisy is breath-taking.
I know how fraudulent the innovation excuse for charters is because I have two kids with very different needs who both benefited from wonderful elementary-school programs developed WITHIN the public schools in New York City. Both schools were inner-city with 80-90% population of low-income kids. One was fairly traditional, although with lots of arts, and offered an inclusion program that enormously benefited our special-needs kid; another was very progressive and was just right for our artistically ambitious “neurotypical” one. What made the schools work? The teachers were in charge, and working as a team with visionary educators who wanted above all to serve the kids who needed them most. Idealism in spite of everything is — at least still for a while — alive and well in the public school system.
If we want innovation, let’s try liberating public school teachers from mindless state and federal mandates. Let them propose and develop new programs, and give them ample support to do so. I’ve seen this happen and it works, and it serves all our children.
The charters by and large are NOT innovating, they are just siphoning.
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To respond to the FL teacher: Yes, the Democratic party, for the most part, has abandoned unions or just taken them for granted. The corporate Democrats certainly don’t care about unions. The unionization rate has shrunk to 11.2% of the work force compared to a 30% to 34% unionization rate in the 1950s. There is an all out total nuclear war against unions in this country. The GOP is rabidly anti-union and the Ds just pay lip service to unions as they do little to actually help them.
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Persons of the political ilk currently controlling America believe that no public service ever works, so when they get in power they break them to prove they don’t work.
Sent from my iPhone
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Catherine Lomas Scott: bulls eye!
I have written before on this blog that the trendsetters and heavy hitters in the self-proclaimed “education reform” movement, when placed in charge of public schools, keep aiming for twofers.
As in John Deasy, former Supt. of LAUSD and rheephormer par excellence, got a twofer by: 1), pushing through the predictable catastrophes of iPads and MISIS and generating a lot of $tudent $ucce$$ for a few [albeit not as much as he wanted]; and 2), as evidenced in the LATIMES section called READERS REACT, this venal mismanagement of LAUSD by those that despise public education is used as an argument by some against—get this!—advocates of public education!
Yes, the rheephormistas will have our cake and eat theirs too. If we let them.
Thankfully, it is hard to smash and grab and keep it quiet when we’ve got folks like the owner of this blog that continues one of our finest American traditions:
“With reasonable men, I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter, nor waste arguments where they will certainly be lost.”
BTW, did that “shrill” and “strident” William Lloyd Garrison ever do anything worth remembering?
😎
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Jazzman shows how these opportunistic sharks, with the help of the complicit federal government, are swallowing huge chunks of tax free public real estate while they make a fortune renting the properties back to charters. This type of scheme may very well be what the Wall St. crowd is anticipating trying once Andy boy clears the way for them in New York. There must be a way to find something illegal in the scheme!
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Academica has its hooks into Utah in a major way. Several current and former legislators either work for, or have family working for, the chain. They build charter schools like they’re going out of style, but are famous for their midyear “dump” of struggling students back into the public schools. They have no loyalty to teachers, and fired a teacher several years ago simply for reporting that a student was accessing pornography at school.
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Alabama’s legislators are determined to start allowing for charter schools. It is the first item on their agenda this spring. I don’t think that many parents understand the ramifications of this and they certainly don’t realize that their less than perfect child might not be welcomed by a charter school. I’m trying to tell them…
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The public school at which I teach also has a number of students return from charter schools, often after being counseled out. Charter schools do not return any of the funding they received for the students’ education, and the children often have developed negative beliefs about themselves due to the experience. This sometimes leads to increased behavior issues that can really disrupt classroom communities and learning.
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Speaking of Florida, this won’t go over well.
Click to access 23479001703540-26172340.pdf
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This report on school choice in NOLA from NPR’s Anna Kamanetz was fascinating:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/ed/2015/01/15/376966406/a-new-study-reveals-much-about-how-parents-really-choose-schools
This quote provides a synopsis of a study that was the basis of the report:
“This last point is crucial because it suggests that a choice-based system all by itself won’t necessarily increase equity. The most economically disadvantaged students may have parents who are making decisions differently from other families. These parents appear to be more interested in factors other than academic quality as the state defines it. Maybe they have access to different, or less, information. If this is true, choice could actually increase, rather than diminish, achievement gaps within a city”
It seems that universal choice in schools won’t improve schools any more than universal choice in dining establishments improves diet. Bottom line: we cannot afford to let the marketplace determine standards in schools.
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wgersen, I had a post about the report by anya kamenetz and included a commentary on the same report by mercedes schneider.
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